Dr. King's message of tolerance still resonates today

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 85 had he not been struck down by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968.

Today, his birthday is being observed by many Americans through service projects aimed at making life better for the less fortunate.

They are consistent with the mission of the civil rights leader whose vision of racial and economic equality is best remembered by his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial that highlighted the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963.

More than half a century later, much still needs to be done to achieve the goals outlined by King, not the least of which is a world without violence. He was an outspoken opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War because of the carnage it produced. If King were alive today, he would undoubtedly lend his voice to the growing outcry for tighter gun control, especially in light of the massacres committed by shooters with sickening regularity in this nation.

King certainly would be appalled at the high number of injuries and murders committed annually by gunmen in Pennsylvania cities like Chester where, from 1948 to 1951 he was on staff at Calvary Baptist Church while studying at the old Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Delaware County.

In 1964, when he was 35, King became the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The next year he received the Judaism and World Peace Award of the Synagogue Council of America.

King earned those accolades because he waged a peaceful war against bigotry, although he and his supporters were often met with brutality, even by police. After Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., King led a 382-day boycott of the city’s bus lines. In 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

Seven years later, King was arrested in Alabama, where racial discrimination was rampant, for defying a court order barring demonstrations. Even his fellow ministers chastised him, calling his behavior “unwise and untimely.” King’s response to them was his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in which he explained why civil disobedience is sometimes necessary to bring light to an unjust law.

“I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law,” wrote King.

A year later, King’s peaceful vigilance, was rewarded. In 1964 the U.S. Civil Rights Act was passed, outlawing nationwide, discrimination based on race and gender. King’s defiance of discriminatory legislation was the continuation of efforts that began more than a century earlier by abolitionists in the United States. For example, Thomas Garrett, a Quaker born in Upper Darby in 1789, helped more than 2,700 slaves escape to freedom during 40 years as a station master on the Underground Railroad. He was fined $5,400 in 1848 for “harboring fugitives.”

One of King’s advisers, in fact, was Bayard Rustin, coordinator of the 1963 March on Washington that drew an estimated 250,000 peaceful protesters. A West Chester native who attended Cheyney University in Thornbury, Rustin was not only an outspoken supporter of racial equality, he was an openly gay man who was jailed for his homosexuality in Pasadena, Calif., in 1953. Last Aug. 8, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama who noted, “As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.”

Rustin was actually spurned by some of his civil rights associates because of his sexual orientation. Obviously the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not one of them. Emulation of his unconditional tolerance is one of the best ways to honor the civil rights pioneer on his birthday, and every day of the year.